Word Type
If can be a noun or a conjunction.
if used as a noun:
- An if clause representing a condition; a protasis introduced by if.
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
if used as a conjunction:
- Supposing that, assuming that, in the circumstances that; used to introduce a condition or choice.
"If it rains, I will get wet." - Supposing that; used with past subjunctive indicating that the condition is not fulfilled.
"I'd prefer it if you took your shoes off." - Although; used to introduce a concession.
"He was a great friend, if a little stingy at the bar." - In the event that a statement is true (a programming statement that acts in a similar manner).
"If A, then B, else C." - Whether; used to introducing a noun clause as the object of certain verbs.
"I don't know if I want to go or not."
Conjunctions are connector words. Examples of conjunctions are: and, but, so. They help us to group words and connect phrases, like in the sentence: "We have apples and oranges, but we need bananas." Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is if?
- Conjunction usage: If it rains, I will get wet.
- Conjunction usage: I'd prefer it if you took your shoes off.
- Conjunction usage: He was a great friend, if a little stingy at the bar.
- Conjunction usage: If A, then B, else C.
- Conjunction usage: I don't know if I want to go or not.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of if are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of if, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
